Spec: Screen

The screen call lets you record whenever a user sees a screen, the mobile equivalent of page, in your mobile app, along with any properties about the screen. Calling page or screen in one of our sources is one of the first steps to getting started with Segment.

Here’s the payload of a typical screen call, with most common fields removed:

Identities

The User ID is a unique identifier for the user performing the actions. Check out the User ID docs for more detail.

The Anonymous ID can be any pseudo-unique identifier, for cases where you don’t know who the user is, but you still want to tie them to an event. Check out the Anonymous ID docs for more detail.

Note: In our browser and mobile libraries a User ID is automatically added from the state stored by a previous identify call, so you do not need to add it yourself. They will also automatically handle Anonymous ID’s under the covers.

Name

Each screen can be tagged with a name. For example, many apps have a “Signup” screen that can be useful to tag so that you can see users as they move through your funnel.

Properties

Properties are extra pieces of information that describe the screen. They can be anything you want.

We’ve reserved some properties that have semantic meanings, and we handle them in special ways. You should only use reserved properties for their intended meaning.

Reserved properties we have standardized:

Property

Type

Description

name

String

Name of the screen

This is reserved for future use.

If you have any questions, or see anywhere we can improve our documentation, please let us know!